Arizona:Builders Escape Homeowners Bill of Rights

One can only hope this is a first chapter and not the end of the book to some form of a homeowner bill of rights, eventually nationwide. If voters in fact voted to keep builder protections in place, then I have no doubt they were not informed of the actual issues at stake. Mis-informed is more likely, as there are huge resources available to the groups that want to block fair liabilities to their collective profit schemes.

People who bought homes to live in them, to build equity, to establish security, and lost all of these things to builders, simply because bad builders cannot be held accountable for their commonly destructive profit schemes, lost again in Arizona. Our message as victims is not reaching people, or it’s falling on deafened ears.

If we speak up about the depth of how destructive a defective home building or mortgage scam can be, someone from the industry jumps in and calls us whiners. If we get scammed by hidden or deliberately misleading clauses in a contract, we are called foolish. If we cooperate with builders to remedy problems, and they refuse to remedy them, we are still called uncooperative, and not due real remedy.

The trend in America, where grass root movements calling for consumer protections are countered by business funded astro-turf movements is still going strong. They can somehow still claim the consumer protection equals excessive cost to the consumers with a straight face, even after millions of consumers have crashed because of the well documented lack of protection and accountability.

The lack of so called “expensive” protections is the heart of the billions of dollars consumers will have to pay while keeping the home building industry schemes relatively liability free. To all those people who do not fall into the ten to twenty percent range of victims of the industry, they don’t seem to realize they are now victims too.

Consumer activists, who happen to be victims of builder schemes, have been foretelling this crash was coming with our inside knowledge of what the business was doing to consumers. And that it was due to the lack of accountability, not inability. We can repeat the same mistakes for economic recovery, and it will work just as before, but only to the same end as we’re seeing now. 

Denying consumer protections like this is not how we will create a strong enduring economy. It is short term thinking or absolute falsehood to continue believing that protecting big builders and big business is the security of our economy. Today we have proof positive that the security of the economy is the average consumer. We’re the real heart and strength of our economy and our country.

I recall seeing that trick used before, turning fear of liability on homeowners to serve the builder. Sad. My understanding is, as a homeowner, you already can get sued as a seller for non-disclosure of home defects, even if the builder created them. That would in fact be be true here. It is only the home builder that can't be sued as things stand. Wonder if the good people of Arizona will be pissed when they find out how bad they got duped? I hope so...if they ever do find out.

Fear is even used within the industry. Millions make a living in the business, and so many believe they will be out of work if buyers have "too many" rights. HOBB is like a skull and bones warnings to them, but that is also a lie. The reality is, many of them would not be living on such big boom to bust cycles.

As much as I hate my home's builder, I know the fact they're crashing now really hurts a lot of people just trying to make a living, not just the big sleaze bags within, who have no cares about whose lives they ruin for an extra buck. The worst offenders are likely crashing gently on a big pile of money. They all tend to hate us, never thinking to point the finger at who actually created us.

The builders lie so much I tend to feel everything that comes out of their mouths is bull.  In Colorado, their lobbyists lied about pending legislation to kill it, too.  They told voters it'd raise their taxes if they voted for the bill, but it had nothing to do with taxes.  Fortunately in that case the voters did vote for it anyway.  The lobbyist was exposed as a liar, but nothing happened to him, and he claimed lying was 'protected free speech.'